The ctrl key would act as escape if short-pressed with no other key.
Because I rebind caps lock to control anyway, that puts both control
and escape in perfect reach of my left pinky. No more reaching up or down
for either key. It's amazing!

F19 was mapped to cmd-ctrl-shift-option. Why F19? Because it is on no
modern keyboard, and has no default usage in modern operating systems. So I
bound it to a key on my ergodox, and use it as a
hyper
modifier key. However, I went a step further, and made short presses on
this key input cmd-space (the spotlight shortcut). Surprisingly convenient.

The left and right shift keys would act as left and right parenthesis when
short-pressed with no other keys.

These hacks have become second nature, part of my muscle memory. Losing them
would be terrible for my productivity. So I waited for Karabiner to be updated
to Sierra.....cut to today, 9 months after Sierra was released, and Karabiner
still has not been updated.

Today I found out that a good friend of mine quit Facebook. I was astounded --
he had just been filled with such righteous indignation about the election, and
big ideas about the change that we needed to bring about. How could he bring
about that change if he removed the best tool for talking to people?

But the more we talked, the more convinced I was that he had it right.

You take a little bit of it so you can hate the other side. And it tastes
kind of good. And you like how it feels. And there's a gentle high to the
condemnation, right? And you know you're right, right? You know you're right.

Social media is at the center of this. Facebook is designed to give you this
high. It is designed to give you exactly what you want to see/hear, because
that keeps you coming back and lets them serve you more ads.

We craft echo chambers for ourselves. We are increasingly convinced we are
right and the other side is wrong, and if we ever do happen to come in contact
with someone from the other side, we talk past each other until we're blue in
the face. Anger and indignation prevail, reason and empathy fail.

In the last three days I've seen very few productive conversations happening on
social media. We try to empathize, we try to make our points. But without the
human connection of one-on-one communication, we make no progress. We high five
those that agree with us and ignore those who don't. We may not even realize
we're ignoring anyone -- the Facebook algorithm is making that choice for us.

In his last
post
before quitting Facebook, my friend Mike made some cogent points about our
rejection of fact in favor of our echo chambers:

After a century of prosperity, we started to believe that we knew better than
what newspapers told us, or scientists told us, or economists told us. We
stopped believing in classical books by great thinkers and started believing in
podcasts. In even the best cases, we fired articles at each other instead of
arguments. What’s more, we thought that our skepticism of expertise was the
fault of the expert and not our own. We built the Internet in hopes that it
would foster the greatest exchange of ideas in human history. Hopes of that
nobility have been diminished.

This election is a lot of things but above all, it’s cultural hubris boiled
over.

He goes on to talk about our rejection of fact-based media in favor of our
little social media worlds:

Collectively, we rejected newspapers, nearly bankrupted them and then
wondered what happened to the fourth estate. I’m not so sure that we should be
as outraged as ashamed.

One of my favorite quotes:

If you are unwilling to accept facts that do not align with your view of
reality, you are the most dangerous kind of coward.

But Mike doesn't leave us without a call to action.

So, if you want to be angry, be angry — for a while, at least.

When you’re done, though, go out and buy a newspaper subscription to every
single publication that you can afford to support. Do this not just for papers
which lean in your direction but any paper which has reputable, hard-working
reporters who are dedicated to shining a light where it needs to shine. Read
all of them. Every day.

When they report the facts, accept them as facts — not as a hypothesis which
has its truth contingent on the institution which presented it.

And, too, when they editorialize, accept that as opinion from people who
understand the world in a sophisticated way. Admire that sophistication, even
if you do not agree with its conclusions.

Do not conflate facts and opinions. Even if you are wrong five percent of the
time and bias sneaks into reporting, accept it and move on. Stop throwing
babies out with bathwater.

Finally, find a friend, if you can, and see where there might be common
ground to stand on.

The waters rise fast and we only survive if we hold on to each other.

Stronger together.

Last night I spent a solid two hours talking to two of my best friends while we
ate tacos after playing basketball. It was a productive, respectful
conversation. I learned things and grew, and we didn't just talk past each
other. Granted, this was helped by the fact that we have similar views, but it
was refreshing all the same.

I want more of those nights. I want to have smaller, real conversations with
people. I want to learn and grow. I want to be more than just retweets and
likes.

So here's my plan: I plan to get back to my subscription to The Economist and
The Washington Post. I plan to read fact-based reporting and editorializing and
form my own opinions.

But as importantly, I have to get out of my echo chamber. And I'm less and less
willing to feed into the machine that caused this: Facebook.

In a few days, after most people who will see this post have seen it, I will
likely disable my Facebook account.

Twitter is harder. I love Twitter: It's the poison I crave. But I think it has
to go as well, at least for awhile. So I'll be taking a break.

But that doesn't mean that I don't want to talk. In fact, I want to talk more
than ever. But I don't want to do it on Facebook or Twitter.

Call me. Text me. Let's go grab a drink (soda for me) or some lunch and chat.
Let's make real relationships, and have real conversations.

I mean, she fought very hard. Hillary has worked very long and very hard over
a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service
to our country.

I mean that very sincerely. Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of
division, have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and
independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as
one united people.

Hopefully this is the Trump that will enter office as our next president.

Today I'm less worried about Trump as president than I am about the hate,
mistrust, racism, and sexism that his campaign made mainstream. He validated
monstrous behaviors.

Read every story in that link. Think about what it would be like to live in
fear of the people around you.

As a straight white male, I'm blessed with safety from acts like this. I will
wield that safety in defense of those who are not. I won't allow casual or
joking racism. If I see someone being harassed, I will step in. I will serve
and love those around me. And I will pray for those who are living in fear
today.

For much of my life I identified as a Republican. In the last few years I've
found myself identifying less and less with that party. Not to say I'm a
Democrat; both parties have serious problems.

This year I voted for Hillary. Not because she was the lesser of two evils.
She's far from perfect, and I don't agree with her on everything. But she's an
accomplished politician and a qualified presidential candidate. I like the
strength with which she has dealt with Trump's attacks. I voted for her because
I'm With Her.

This is probably not a popular opinion. But I'm trying to be true to my
opinions rather than just hiding behind the "Trump is a monster" argument.

I was catching up on my RSS feeds and I found [this review of the last Hobbit
movie by Ars Technica][1]. Sums up my feelings perfectly:

There's one big thing that doomed these movies from the outset—the fiscally
smart but artistically bankrupt decision to make a single, shortish
children's novel into three feature-length prequel films.

Artistically bankrupt. Perfect way to put it.

What these movies desperately need are boundaries, reasons to condense scenes
or cut them out entirely instead of reasons to pile on more. Chopping these
down into a pair of two-and-a-half hour movies would drastically improve the
pacing even if you didn't address the characterization or the tone issues.
You could leave around three hours of slow-motion action sequences, goblin
chases, and Radagast the Brown on the cutting room floor! Sounds great,
doesn't it?

Recently I've been having issues with Linode Manager repeatedly logging me out
every few requests. I figured this was related to ipv4/ipv6 switching, because
sometimes the logout would also trigger a new IP whitelist request, which would
sometimes be ipv4, and sometimes be ipv6.

Now, before we actually start the service, let's get our resolver in place.
OSX allows us to define resolve data for specific addresses using files in
/etc/resolver/. Here is my /etc/resolver/manager.linode.com:

nameserver 127.0.0.1

Basically, we're telling the operating system to use our local DNS server
(provided by dnsmasq) for lookups for manager.linode.com.

We also need to configure dnsmasq to force manager.linode.com to a specific
address. First, we need an IPv4 address to work with: